Title: On a risk mitigation policy for hazmat transport based on gateways
Speaker: Maddalena Nonato
Venue: Seminar hall, second floor, IEOR Building.
Day, Date, Time: 20th August 2024, 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm.
Abstract:
Hazardous materials (hazmat) transport is usually subject to regulations in order to prevent environmental damage and protect the public from exposure to potential hazards. Two conflicting stakeholders are involved in the regulation-setting process: the authority, which aims to minimize total risk, and the carriers, which pursue minimum cost. Usually, the authority cannot require carriers to follow a specific route for each shipment, i.e., the safest route from origin to destination. Therefore, authority seeks to minimize risk through regulations that implement indirect control. In addition to the best-known risk mitigation policies, i.e. road closures and toll charging, a third policy based on gateways has proved capable of reducing total risk at little detriment to total cost. The gateway-based policy (GBP) consists of 1) selecting a limited number of locations where gateways will be installed and 2) assigning a gateway to each shipment that the carrier will pass through on its way from origin to destination. A bi-level programming model for GBP will be introduced and its one-level reduction will be presented. The trade off between cost and risk will be discussed and it will be shown how social equity,understood as the fair distribution of risk, can be managed without losing the structure of the problem that allows single level reformulation.Computational results for the city of Ravenna, Italy, will support our claims.
Brief Bio: Maddalena Nonato is an Associate Professor of Operations Research at the University of Ferrara, Italy, that she joined in 2006.Previously, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Perugia.She graduated from the University of Pisa, Italy, where she obtained a Master's degree in Computer Science and a PhD in OR. Her research interestsmainly concern combinatorial optimisation applied to routing and scheduling problems in transport and healthcare. She authored more than 60 scientific
papers.